Current technology has been marked by the technological convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. An area where this relationship has been advantageous is that of digital video recording. This has resulted in the emergence of a set top box based upon the DVRs. A description of the PVRs and DVRs and like digital video recorders and their increasing consumer functions as computer controlled “engines” in television set top boxes may be found in: IEEE Spectrum periodical, (IEEE Inc.), New York, N.Y., July 2002, at pp. 26-31. The DVR has many advantages, particularly ease of use to the users in the advance scheduling of television programs to be subsequently sequentially recorded. However, extensive usage of the DVR has also given rise to a set of problems involving the viewer, the broadcasting organizations that broadcast the television programs and the sponsors or hosts of the commercial content that is, of course, embedded in such television programs.
The background of this television industry should be briefly reviewed in order to better understand the problems and issues. When television was first introduced for mass media entertainment and education, the television program content was broadcast essentially line of sight antenna to antenna. The content was, of course, supported and paid for by commercial sponsors or hosts who paid for or created the content in order to have opportunities to interleave or embed periodic commercial content into the television program. This was the return benefit that the sponsor or host received for his support of the television program. As the demand for television programming rapidly increased, traditional line of sight antenna broadcasting had to be supplemented and replaced to a very great extent by cable and satellite services. The frequency channels that the Government made available for the presentation of programming by respective television stations also rapidly increased. This led to television service providers that obtained and consolidated the programs transmitted by the respective television stations to be presented to viewers via government designated frequency channels. The original television stations would transmit at their assigned frequencies either by direct line of sight, cable or through satellites. The television service providers then received the respective program channel signals and consolidated all the data in such transmissions into an integrated data stream representative of an extensive set of television programs being presented on corresponding channels into an unitary data stream that was then compressed and transmitted to the television service provider's subscribers either via satellite or cable. This integrated data stream was encrypted to protect the provider's revenues. The viewer could then receive this integrated data stream and extract any “live” or real-time television program through his television receiver or frequency channel tuner. The provider system would extract the appropriate television program data directly from the real-time satellite or cable service provider integrated data stream. The extracted program data would be decrypted and decompressed and the television program would be displayed on a real-time basis on the television set display.
Where the user wished to record a particular television program for future viewing, it would be extracted at its scheduled viewing period from the integrated data stream in the same manner as described, decrypted, decompressed and recorded on disk drives (DVRs). Individual programs on their respective channels could still be recorded on a real-time basis by first extracting, decrypting and decompressing.
This, of course, resulted in the current state of the DVR or PVR industry where the user, with an appropriate DVR, could record dozens of broadcast and transmitted television programs for future viewing merely by entering its unique identifier. Despite all of the described advances in the presentation of television programming to the viewers, the state of the industry is such that television programs are still, to a large part, produced for the television sponsors or hosts who still interleave commercial content into the broadcast television programs. In addition, greater and greater numbers of viewers are viewing their television programming from their personal recordings.
It naturally has developed that many are bothered by commercials for two reasons: they interrupt and take up a great amount of recorded content; and commercials consume a substantial amount of recording DVR space. Television commercials generally consume about 25% of DVR storage space and, in the case of major sports events, almost 50% of recording space. There have been various implementations addressing the preservation and display of the sponsor's commercials. The present invention addresses how recorded DVR space may be optimized with respect to recorded commercials.